Category Archives: post production

Production, post, visual effects, VR… you can’t do it without a strong infrastructure. This infrastructure must include storage and products that work hand in hand with it.

This year we spoke to a sampling of those providing storage solutions — of all kinds — for media and entertainment, as well as a storage-agnostic company that helps get your large files from point A to point B safely and quickly.

We gathered questions from real-world users — things that they would ask of these product makers if they were sitting across from them.

Quantum’s Keith LissakWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
We offer a complete storage ecosystem based around our StorNext shared storage and data management solution,including Xcellis high-performance primary storage, Lattus object storage and Scalar archive and cloud. Our customers include broadcasters, production companies, post facilities, animation/VFX studios, NCAA and professional sports teams, ad agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Xcellis features continuous scalability and can be sized to precisely fit current requirements and scaled to meet future demands simply by adding storage arrays. Capacity and performance can grow independently, and no additional accelerators or controllers are needed to reach petabyte scale.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
We don’t have exact numbers, but a growing number of our customers are using cloud storage. Our FlexTier cloud-access solution can be used with both public (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and private (StorageGrid, CleverSafe, Scality) storage.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
We offer a range of StorNext 4K Reference Architecture configurations for handling the demanding workflows, including 4K, 8K and VR. Our customers can choose systems with small or large form-factor HDDs, up to an all-flash SSD system with the ability to handle 66 simultaneous 4K streams.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
StorNext systems are OS-agnostic and can work with all Mac, Windows and Linux clients with no discernible difference.

Zerowait’s Rob RobinsonWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
Zerowait’s SimplStor storage product line provides storage administrators scalable, flexible and reliable on-site storage needed for their growing storage requirements and workloads. SimplStor’s platform can be configured to work in Linux or Windows environments and we have several customers with multiple petabytes in their data centers. SimplStor systems have been used in VFX production for many years and we also provide solutions for video creation and many other large data environments.

Additionally, Zerowait specializes in NetApp service, support and upgrades, and we have provided many companies in the media and VFX businesses with off-lease transferrable licensed NetApp storage solutions. Zerowait provides storage hardware, engineering and support for customers that need reliable and big storage. Our engineers support customers with private cloud storage and customers that offer public cloud storage on our storage platforms. We do not provide any public cloud services to our customers.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Our customers typically need on-site storage for processing speed and security. We have developed many techniques and monitoring solutions that we have incorporated into our service and hardware platforms. Our SimplStor and NetApp customers need storage infrastructures that scale into the multiple petabytes, and often require GigE, 10GigE or a NetApp FC connectivity solution. For customers that can’t handle the bandwidth constraints of the public Internet to process their workloads, Zerowait has the engineering experience to help our customers get the most of their on-premises storage.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based products (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Many of our customers use public cloud solutions for their non-proprietary data storage while using our SimplStor and NetApp hardware and support services for their proprietary, business-critical, high-speed and regulatory storage solutions where data security is required.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
SimplStor’s density and scalability make it perfect for use in HD and higher resolution environments. Our SimplStor platform is flexible and we can accommodate customers with special requests based on their unique workloads.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
Zerowait’s NetApp and SimplStor platforms are compatible with both Linux (NFS) and Windows (CIFS) environments. OS X is supported in some applications. Every customer has a unique infrastructure and set of applications they are running. Customers will see differences in performance, but our flexibility allows us to customize a solution to maximize the throughput to meet workflow requirements.

Signiant’s Mike NashWhat kind of storage works with your solution, and who is the main user or users of that storage?Signiant’s Media Shuttle file transfer solution is storage agnostic, and for nearly 200,000 media pros worldwide it is the primary vehicle for sending and sharing large files. Even though Media Shuttle doesn’t provide storage, and many users think of their data as “in Media Shuttle.” In reality, their files are located in whatever storage their IT department has designated. This might be the company’s own on-premises storage, or it could be their AWS or Microsoft Azure cloud storage tenancy. Our users employ a Media Shuttle portal to send and share files; they don’t have to think about where the files are stored.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their use or the bandwidth of their networks (or both)?
Media Shuttle is delivered as a cloud-native SaaS solution, so it can be up and running immediately for new customers, and it can scale up and down as demand changes. The servers that power the software are managed by our DevOps team and monitored 24×7 — and the infrastructure is auto-scaling and instantly available. Signiant does not charge for bandwidth, so customers can use our solutions with any size pipe at no additional cost. And while Media Shuttle can scale up to support the needs of the largest media companies, the SaaS delivery model also makes it accessible to even the smallest production and post facilities.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with cloud storage (i.e. AWS or Microsoft Azure)?
Cloud adoption within the M&E industry remains uneven, so it’s no surprise that we see a mixed picture when we look at the storage choices our customers make. Since we first introduced the cloud storage option, there has been a constant month-over-month growth in the number of customers deploying portals with cloud storage. It’s not yet in parity with on-prem storage, but the growth trends are clear.

On-premises content storage is very far from going away. We see many Media Shuttle customers taking a hybrid approach, with some portals using cloud storage and others using on-prem storage. It’s also interesting to note that when customers do choose cloud storage, we increasingly see them use both AWS and Azure.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
We can move any size of file. As media files continue to get bigger, the value of our solutions continues to rise. Legacy solutions such as FTP, which lack any file acceleration, will grind things to a halt if 4K, 8K, VR and other huge files need to be moved between locations. And consumer-oriented sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive become non-starters with these types of files.

What platforms do your system connect to (e.g. Mac OS X, Windows, Linux), and what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
Media Shuttle is designed to work with a wide range of platforms. Users simply log in to portals using any web browser. In the background, a native application installed on the user’s personal computer provides the acceleration functionality. This App works with Windows or Mac OSX systems.

On the IT side of things, no installed software is required for portals deployed with cloud storage. To connect Media Shuttle to on-premises storage, the IT team will run Signiant software on a computer in the customer’s network. This server-side software is available for Linux and Windows.

NetApp’s Jason DanielsonWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
NetApp has a wide portfolio of storage and data management products and services. We have four fundamentally different storage platforms — block, file, object and converged infrastructure. We use these platforms and our data fabric software to create a myriad of storage solutions that incorporate flash, disk and cloud storage.

1. NetApp E-Series block storage platform is used by leading shared file systems to create robust and high-bandwidth shared production storage systems. Boutique post houses, broadcast news operations and corporate video departments use these solutions for their production tier.
2. NetApp FAS network-attached file storage runs NetApp OnTap. This platform supports many thousands of applications for tens of thousands of customers in virtualized, private cloud and hybrid cloud environments. In media, this platform is designed for extreme random-access performance. It is used for rendering, transcoding, analytics, software development and the Internet-of-things pipelines.
3. NetApp StorageGrid Webscale object store manages content and data for back-up and active archive (or content repository) use cases. It scales to dozens of petabytes, billions of objects and currently 16 sites. Studios and national broadcast networks use this system and are currently moving content from tape robots and archive silos to a more accessible object tier.
4. NetApp SolidFire converged and hyper-converged platforms are used by cloud providers and enterprises running large private clouds for quality-of-service across hundreds to thousands of applications. Global media enterprises appreciate the ease of scaling, simplicity of QOS quota setting and overall maintenance for largest scale deployments.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
The four platforms mentioned above scale up and scale out to support well beyond the largest media operations in the world. So our challenge is not scalability for large environments but appropriate sizing for individual environments. We are careful to design storage and data management solutions that are appropriate to media operations’ individual needs.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Seven years ago, NetApp set out on a major initiative to build the data fabric. We are well on the path now with products designed specifically for hybrid cloud (a combination of private cloud and public cloud) workloads. While the uptake in media and entertainment is slower than in other industries, we now have hundreds of customers that use our storage in hybrid cloud workloads, from backup to burst compute.

We help customers wanting to stay cloud-agnostic by using AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform flexibly and as the project and pricing demands. AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Telsra and ASE along with another hundred or so cloud storage providers include NetApp storage and data management products in their service offerings.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
For higher bandwidth, or bitrate, video production we’ll generally architect a solution with our E-Series storage under either Quantum StorNext or PixitMedia PixStor. Since 2012, when the NetApp E5400 enabled the mainstream adoption of 4K workflows, the E-Series platform has seen three generations of upgrades and the controllers are now more than 4x faster. The chassis has remained the same through these upgrades so some customers have chosen to put the latest controllers into these chassis to improve bandwidth or to utilize faster network interconnect like 16 gigabit fibrechannel. Many post houses continue to use fibrechannel to the workstation for these higher bandwidth video formats while others have chosen to move to Ethernet (40 and 100 Gigabit). As flash (SSDs) continue to drop in price it is starting to be used for video production in all flash arrays or in hybrid configurations. We recently showed our new E570 all flash array supporting NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology providing 21GB/s of bandwidth and 1 million IOPs with less than 100µs of latency. This technology is initially targeted at super-computing use cases and we will see if it is adopted over the next couple of years for UHD production workloads.

What platforms do your system connect to (Mac OSx, Windows, Linux, etc.), and what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
NetApp maintains a compatibility matrix table that delineates our support of hundreds of client operating systems and networking devices. Specifically, we support Mac OS X, Windows and various Linux distributions. Bandwidth expectations differ between these three operating systems and Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity options, but rather than make a blanket statement about these, we prefer to talk with customers about their specific needs and legacy equipment considerations.

G-Technology’s Greg CrosbyWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
Western Digital’s G-Technology products provide high-performing and reliable storage solutions for end-to-end creative workflows, from capture and ingest to transfer and shuttle, all the way to editing and final production.

The G-Technology brand supports a wide range of users for both field and in-studio work, with solutions that span a number of portable handheld drives — which are often times used to backup content on-the-go — all the way to in-studio drives that offer capacities up to 144TB. We recognize that each creative has their own unique workflow and some embrace the use of cloud-based products. We are proud to be companions to those cloud services as a central location to store raw content or a conduit to feed cloud features and capabilities.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Our line ranges from small portable and rugged drives to large, multi-bay RAID and NAS solutions, for all aspects of the media and entertainment industry. Integrating the latest interface technology such as USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, our storage solutions will take advantage of the ability to quickly transfer files.

We make it easy to take a ton of storage into the field. The G-Speed Shuttle XL drive is available in capacities up to 96TB, and an optional Pelican case, with handle, is available, making it easy to transport in the field and mitigating any concerns about running out of storage. We recently launched the G-Drive mobile SSD R-Series. This drive is built to withstand a three meter (nine foot) drop, and is able to endure accidental bumps or drops, given that it is a solid-state drive.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Many of our customers are using cloud-based solutions to complement their creative workflows. We find that most of our customers use our solutions as the primary storage or to easily transfer and shuttle their content since the cloud is not an efficient way to move large amounts of data. We see the cloud capabilities as a great way to share project files and low-resolution content, or collaborate with others on projects as well as distribute share a variety of deliverables.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
Today’s camera technology enables not only capture at higher resolutions but also higher frame rates with more dynamic imagery. We have solutions that can easily support multi-stream 4K, 8K and VR workflows or multi-layer photo and visual effects projects. G-Technology is well positioned to support these creative workflows as we integrate the latest technologies into our storage solutions. From small portable and rugged SSD drives to high-capacity and fast multi-drive RAID solutions with the latest Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C interface technology we are ready tackle a variety of creative endeavors.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.), and what differences might users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
Our complete portfolio of external storage solutions work for Mac and PC users alike. With native support for Apple Time Machine, these solutions are formatted for Mac OS out of the box, but can be easily reformatted for Windows users. G-Technology also has a number of strategic partners with technology vendors, including Apple, Atomos, Red Camera, Adobe and Intel.

Panasas’ David SallakWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
Panasas ActiveStor is an enterprise-class easy-to-deploy parallel scale-out NAS (network-attached storage) that combines Flash and SATA storage with a clustered file system accessed via a high-availability client protocol driver with support for standard protocols.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
ActiveStor is engineered to scale easily. There are no specific architectural limits for how widely the ActiveStor system can scale out, and adding more workloads and more users is accomplished without system downtime. The latest release of ActiveStor can grow either storage or bandwidth needs in an environment that lets metadata responsiveness, data performance and data capacity scale independently.

For example, we quote capacity and performance numbers for a Panasas storage environment containing 200 ActiveStor Hybrid 100 storage node enclosures with 5 ActiveStor Director 100 units for filesystem metadata management. This configuration would result in a single 57PB namespace delivering 360GB/s of aggregate bandwidth with an excess of 2.6M IOPs.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Panasas customers deploy workflows and workloads in ways that are well-suited to consistent on-site performance or availability requirements, while experimenting with remote infrastructure components such as storage and compute provided by cloud vendors. The majority of Panasas customers continue to explore the right ways to leverage cloud-based products in a cost-managed way that avoids surprises.

This means that workflow requirements for file-based storage continue to take precedence when processing real-time video assets, while customers also expect that storage vendors will support the ability to use Panasas in cloud environments where the benefits of a parallel clustered data architecture can exploit the agility of underlying cloud infrastructure without impacting expectations for availability and consistency of performance.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
Panasas ActiveStor is engineered to deliver superior application responsiveness via our DirectFlow parallel protocol for applications working in compressed UHD, 4K and higher-resolution media formats. Compared to traditional file-based protocols such as NFS and SMB, DirectFlow provides better granular I/O feedback to applications, resulting in client application performance that aligns well with the compressed UHD, 4K and other extreme-resolution formats.

For uncompressed data, Panasas ActiveStor is designed to support large-scale rendering of these data formats via distributed compute grids such as render farms. The parallel DirectFlow protocol results in better utilization of CPU resources in render nodes when processing frame-based UHD, 4K and higher-resolution formats, resulting in less wall clock time to produce these formats.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
Panasas ActiveStor supports macOS and Linux with our higher-performance DirectFlow parallel client software. We support all client platforms via NFS or SMB as well.

Users would notice that when connecting to Panasas ActiveStor via DirectFlow, the I/O experience is as if users were working with local media files on internal drives, compared to working with shared storage where normal protocol access may result in the slight delay associated with open network protocols.

Facilis’ Jim McKennaWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
We have always focused on shared storage for the facility. It’s high-speed attached storage and good for anyone who’s cutting HD or 4K. Our workflow and management features really make us different than basic network storage. We have attachment to the cloud through software that uses all the latest APIs.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Most of our large customers have been with us for several years, and many started pretty small. Our method of scalability is flexible in that you can decide to simply add expansion drives, add another server, or add a head unit that aggregates multiple servers. Each method increases bandwidth as well as capacity.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Many customers use cloud, either through a corporate gateway or directly uploaded from the server. Many cloud service providers have ways of accessing the file locations from the facility desktops, so they can treat it like another hard drive. Alternatively, we can schedule, index and manage the uploads and downloads through our software.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
Facilis is known for our speed. We still support Fibre Channel when everyone else, it seems, has moved completely to Ethernet, because it provides better speeds for intense 4K and beyond workflows. We can handle UHD playback on 10Gb Ethernet, and up to 4K full frame DPX 60p through Fibre Channel on a single server enclosure.

What platforms do your systems connect to (e.g. Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
We have a custom multi-platform shared file system, not NAS (network attached storage). Even though NAS may be compatible with multiple platforms by using multiple sharing methods, permissions and optimization across platforms is not easily manageable. With Facilis, the same volume, shared one way with one set of permissions, looks and acts native to every OS and even shows up as a local hard disk on the desktop. You can’t get any more cross-platform compatible than that.

SwiftStack’s Mario BlandiniWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
We offer hybrid cloud storage for media. SwiftStack is 100% software and runs on-premises atop the server hardware you already buy using local capacity and/or capacity in public cloud buckets. Data is stored in cloud-native format, so no need for gateways, which do not scale. Our technology is used by broadcasters for active archive and OTT distribution, digital animators for distributed transcoding and mobile gaming/eSports for massive concurrency among others.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
The SwiftStack software architecture separates access, storage and management, where each function can be run together or on separate hardware. Unlike storage hardware with the mix of bandwidth and capacity being fixed to the ports and drives within, SwiftStack makes it easy to scale the access tier for bandwidth independently from capacity in the storage tier by simply adding server nodes on the fly. On the storage side, capacity in public cloud buckets scales and is managed in the same single namespace.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Objectively, use of capacity in public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform is still “early days” for many users. Customers in media however are on the leading edge of adoption, not only for hybrid cloud extending their on-premises environment to a public cloud, but also using a second source strategy across two public clouds. Two years ago it was less than 10%, today it is approaching 40%, and by 2020 it looks like the 80/20 rule will likely apply. Users actually do not care much how their data is stored, as long as their user experience is as good or better than it was before, and public clouds are great at delivering content to users.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
Arguably, larger assets produced by a growing number of cameras and computers have driven the need to store those assets differently than in the past. A petabyte is the new terabyte in media storage. Banks have many IT admins, where media shops have few. SwiftStack has the same consumption experience as public cloud, which is very different than on-premises solutions of the past. Licensing is based on the amount of data managed, not the total capacity deployed, so you pay-as-you-grow. If you save four replicas or use erasure coding for 1.5X overhead, the price is the same.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
The great thing about cloud storage, whether it is on-premises or residing with your favorite IaaS providers like AWS and Google, the interface is HTTP. In other words, every smartphone, tablet, Chromebook and computer has an identical user experience. For classic applications on systems that do not support AWS S3 as an interface, users see the storage as a mount point or folder in their application — either NFS or SMB. The best part, it is a single namespace where data can come in file, get transformed via object, and get read either way, so the user experience does not need to change even though the data is stored in the most modern way.

Dell EMC’s Tom BurnsWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?At Dell EMC, we created two storage platforms for the media and entertainment industry: the Isilon scale-out NAS All-Flash, hybrid and archive platform to consolidate and simplify file-based workflows and the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), a scalable enterprise-grade private cloud solution that provides extremely high levels of storage efficiency, resiliency and simplicity designed for both traditional and next-generation workloads.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
In the media industry, change is inevitable. That’s why every Isilon system is built to rapidly and simply adapt by allowing the storage system to scale performance and capacity together, or independently, as more space or processing power is required. This allows you to scale your storage easily as your business needs dictate.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Over the past five years, Dell EMC media and entertainment customers have added more than 1.5 exabytes of Isilon and ECS data storage to simplify and accelerate their workflows.

Isilon’s cloud tiering software, CloudPools, provides policy-based automated tiering that lets you seamlessly integrate with cloud solutions as an additional storage tier for the Isilon cluster at your data center. This allows you to address rapid data growth and optimize data center storage resources by using the cloud as a highly economical storage tier with massive storage capacity.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
As technologies that enhance the viewing experience continue to emerge, including higher frame rates and resolutions, uncompressed 4K, UHD, high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG), underlying storage infrastructures must effectively scale to keep up with expanding performance requirements.

Dell EMC recently launched the sixth generation of the Isilon platform, including our all-flash (F800), which brings the simplicity and scalability of NAS to uncompressed 4K workflows — something that up until now required expensive silos of storage or complex and inefficient push-pull workflows.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc)? And what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
With Dell EMC Isilon, you can streamline your storage infrastructure by consolidating file-based workflows and media assets, eliminating silos of storage. Isilon scale-out NAS includes integrated support for a wide range of industry-standard protocols allowing the major operating systems to connect using the most suitable protocol, for optimum performance and feature support, including Internet Protocols IPv4, and IPv6, NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP, OpenStack Swift-based Object access for your cloud initiatives and native Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

EditShare’s Lee GriffinWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
Our storage platforms are tailored for collaborative media workflows and post production. It combines the advanced EFS (that’s EditShare File System, in short) distributed file system with intelligent load balancing. It’s a scalable, fault-tolerant architecture that offers cost-effective connectivity. Within our shared storage platforms, we have a unique take on current cloud workflows, with current security and reliability of cloud-based technology prohibiting full migration to cloud storage for production, EditShare AirFlow uses EFS on-premise storage to provide secure access to media from anywhere in the world with a basic Internet connection. Our main users are creative post houses, broadcasters and large corporate companies.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Recently, we upgraded all our platforms to EFS and introduced two new single-node platforms, the EFS 200 and 300. These single-node platforms allow users to grow their storage whilst keeping a single namespace which eliminates management of multiple storage volumes. It enables them to better plan for the future, when their facility requires more storage and bandwidth, they can simply add another node.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
No production is in one location, so the ability to move media securely and back up is still a high priority to our clients. From our Flow media asset management and via our automation module, we offer clients the option to backup their valuable content to places like Amazon S3 servers.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than HD resolutions?
We have many clients working with UHD content who are supplying programming content to broadcasters, film distributors and online subscription media providers. Our solutions are designed to work effortlessly with high data rate content, enabling the bandwidth to expand with the addition of more EFS nodes to the intelligent storage pool. So, our system is ready and working now for 4K content and is future proof for even higher data rates in the future.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
EditShare supplies native client EFS drivers to all three platforms, allowing clients to pick and choose which platform they want to work on. If it is an Autodesk Flame for VFX, a Resolve for grading or our own Lightworks for editing on Linux, we don’t mind. In fact, EFS offers a considerable bandwidth improvement when using our EFS drivers over existing AFP and SMB protocol. Improved bandwidth and speed to all three platforms makes for happy clients!

And there are no differences when clients connect. We work with all three platforms the same way, offering a unified workflow to all creative machines, whether on Mac, Windows or PC.

Scale Logic’s Bob HerzanWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
Scale Logic has developed an ecosystem (Genesis Platform) that includes servers, networking, metadata controllers, single and dual-controller RAID products and purpose-built appliances.

We have three different file systems that allow us to use the storage mentioned above to build SAN, NAS, scale-out NAS, object storage and gateways for private and public cloud. We use a combination of disk, tape and Flash technology to build our tiers of storage that allows us to manage media content efficiently with the ability to scale seamlessly as our customers’ requirements change over time.

We work with customers that range from small to enterprise and everything in between. We have a global customer base that includes broadcasters, post production, VFX, corporate, sports and house of worship.

In addition to the Genesis Platform we have also certified three other tier 1 storage vendors to work under our HyperMDC SAN and scale-out NAS metadata controller (HPE, HDS and NetApp). These partnerships complete our ability to consult with any type of customer looking to deploy a media-centric workflow.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
Great questions and it’s actually built into the name and culture of our company. When we bring a solution to market it has to scale seamlessly and it needs to be logical when taking the customer’s environment into consideration. We focus on being able to start small but scale any system into a high-availability solution with limited to no downtime. Our solutions can scale independently if clients are looking to add capacity, performance or redundancy.

For example, a customer looking to move to 4K uncompressed workflows could add a Genesis Unlimited as a new workspace focused on the 4K workflow, keeping all existing infrastructure in place alongside it, avoiding major adjustments to their facility’s workflow. As more and more projects move to 4K, the Unlimited can scale capacity, performance and the needed HA requirements with zero downtime.

Customers can then start to migrate their content from their legacy storage over to Unlimited and then repurpose their legacy storage onto the HyperFS file system as second tier storage.Finally, once we have moved the legacy storage onto the new file system we also are more than happy to bring the legacy storage and networking hardware under our global support agreements.

How many of the people buying your solutions are using them with another cloud-based product (i.e. Microsoft Azure)?
Cloud continues to be ramping up for our industry, and we have many customers using cloud solutions for various aspects of their workflow. As it pertains to content creation, manipulation and long-term archive, we have not seen much adoption with our customer base. The economics just do not support the level of performance or capacity our clients demand.

However, private cloud or cloud-like configurations are becoming more mainstream for our larger customers. Working with on-premise storage while having DR (disaster recovery) replication offsite continues to be the best solution at this point for most of our clients.

How does your system handle UHD, 4K and other higher-than-HD resolutions?
Our solutions are built not only for the current resolutions but completely scalable to go beyond them. Many of our HD customers are now putting in UHD and 4K workspaces on the same equipment we installed three years ago. In addition to 4K we have been working with several companies in Asia that have been using our HyperFS file system and Genesis HyperMDC to build 8K workflows for the Olympics.

We have a number of solutions designed to meet our customer’s requirements. Some are done with spinning disk, others with all flash, and then even more that want a hybrid approach to seamlessly combine the technologies.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
All of our solutions are designed to support Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. However, how they support the various operating systems is based on the protocol (block or file) we are designing for the facility. If we are building a SAN that is strictly going to be block level access (8/16/32 Gbps Fibre Channel or 1/10/25/40/100 Gbps iSCSI, we would use our HyperFS file system and universal client drivers across all operating systems. If our clients also are looking for network protocols in addition to the block level clients we can support jSMB and NFS but allow access to block and file folders and files at the same time.

For customers that are not looking for block level access, we would then focus our design work around our Genesis NX or ZX product line. Both of these solutions are based on a NAS operating system and simply present themselves with the appropriate protocol over 1/10/25/40 or 100Gb. Genesis ZX solution is actually a software-defined clustered NAS with enterprise feature sets such as unlimited snapshots, metro clustering, thin provisioning and will scale up over 5 Petabytes.

Sonnet Technologies‘ Greg LaPorteWhat kind of storage do you offer, and who is the main user of that storage?
We offer a portable, bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 SSD storage device that fits in your hand. Primary users of this product include video editors and DITs who need a “scratch drive” fast enough to support editing 4K video at 60fps while on location or traveling.

How are you making sure your products are scalable so people can grow either their storage or bandwidth needs (or both)?
The Fusion Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Flash Drive is currently available with 1TB capacity. With data transfer of up to 2,600 MB/s supported, most users will not run out of bandwidth when using this device.

What platforms do your systems connect to (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.)? And what differences might end-users notice when connecting on these different platforms?
Computers with Thunderbolt 3 ports running either macOS Sierra or High Sierra, or Windows 10 are supported. The drive may be formatted to suit the user’s needs, with either an OS-specific format such as HFS+, or cross-platform format such as exFAT.

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Like virtually everything in post production, storage is an ever-changing technology. Camera resolutions and media bitrates are constantly growing, requiring higher storage bitrates and capacities. Productions are increasingly becoming more mobile, demanding storage solutions that can live in an equally mobile environment. Yesterday’s 4K cameras are being replaced by 8K cameras, and the trend does not look to be slowing down.

Yet, at the same time, productions still vary greatly in size, budget, workflow and schedule, which has necessitated more storage options for post production every year. As a post production supervisor, when deciding on a storage solution for a project or set of projects, I always try to have answers to a number of workflow questions.

Let’s start at the beginning with production questions.

What type of video compression is production planning on recording?
Obviously, more storage will be required if the project is recording to Arriraw rather than H.264.

What camera resolution and frame rate?
Once you know the bitrate from the video compression specs, you can calculate the data size on a per-hour basis. If you don’t feel like sitting down with a calculator or spreadsheet for a few minutes, there are numerous online data size calculators, but I particularly like AJA’s DataCalc application, which has tons of presets for cameras and video and audio formats.

How many cameras and how many hours per day is each camera likely to be recording?
Data size per hour, multiplied by hours per day, multiplied by shoot days, multiplied by number of cameras gives a total estimate of the storage required for the shoot. I usually add 10-20% to this estimate to be safe.

Let’s move on to post questions…

Is it an online/offline workflow?
The simplicity of editing online is awesome, and I’m holding out for the day when all projects can be edited with online media. In the meantime, most larger projects require online/offline editorial, so keep in mind the extra storage space for offline editorial proxies. The upside is that raw camera files can be stored on slower, more affordable (even archival) storage through editorial until the online process begins.

On numerous shows I’ve elected to keep the raw camera files on portable external RAID arrays (cloned and stored in different locations for safety) until picture lock. G-Tech, LaCie, OWC and Western Digital all make 48+ TB external arrays on which I’ve stored raw median urging editorial. When you start the online process, copy the necessary media over to your faster online or grading/finishing storage, and finish the project with only the raw files that are used in the locked cut.

How much editorial staff needs to be working on the project simultaneously?
On smaller projects that only require an editorial staff of two or three people who need to access the media at the same time, you may be able to get away with the editors and assistants network sharing a storage array, and working in different projects. I’ve done numerous smaller projects in which a couple editors connected to an external RAID (I’ve had great success with Proavio and QNAP arrays), which is plugged into one workstation and shares over the network. Of course, the network must have enough bandwidth for both machines to play back the media from the storage array, but that’s the case for any shared storage system.

For larger projects that employ five, 10 or more editors and staff, storage that is designed for team sharing is almost a certain requirement. Avid has opened up integrated shared storage to outside storage vendors the past few years, but Avid’s Nexis solution still remains an excellent option. Aside from providing a solid solution for Media Composer and Symphony, Nexis can also be used with basically any other NLE, ranging from Adobe Premiere Pro to Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve to Final Cut Pro and others. The project sharing abilities within the NLEs vary depending on the application, but the clear trend is moving toward multiple editors and post production personnel working simultaneously in the same project.

Does editorial need to be mobile?
Increasingly, editorial is tending to begin near the start of physical production and this can necessitate the need for editors to be on or near set. This is a pretty simple question to answer but it is worth keeping in mind so that a shoot doesn’t end up without enough storage in a place where additional storage isn’t easily available — or the power requirements can’t be met. It’s also a good moment to plan simple things like the number of shuttle or transfer drives that may be needed to ship media back to home base.

Does the project need to be compartmentalized?
For example, should proxy media be on a separate volume or workspace from the raw media/VFX/music/etc.? Compartmentalization is good. It’s safe. Accidents happen, and it’s a pain if someone accidentally deletes everything on the VFX volume or workspace on the editorial storage array. But it can be catastrophic if everything is stored in the same place and they delete all the VFX, graphics, audio, proxy media, raw media, projects and exports.

Split up the project onto separate volumes, and only give write access to the necessary parties. The bigger the project and team, the bigger the risk for accidents, so err on the side of safety when planning storage organization.

Finally, we move to finishing, delivery and archive questions…

Will the project color and mix in-house? What are the delivery requirements? Resolution? Delivery format? Media and other files?
Color grading and finishing often require the fastest storage speeds of the whole pipeline. By this point, the project should be conformed back to the camera media, and the colorist is often working with high bitrate, high-resolution raw media or DPX sequences, EXRs or other heavy file types. (Of course, there are as many workflows as there are projects, many of which can be very light, but let’s consider the trend toward 4K-plus and the fact that raw media generally isn’t getting lighter.) On the bright side, while grading and finishing arrays need to be fast, they don’t need to be huge, since they won’t house all the raw media or editorial media — only what is used in the final cut.

I’m a fan of using an attached SAS or Thunderbolt array, which is capable of providing high bandwidth to one or two workstations. Anything over 20TB shouldn’t be necessary, since the media will be removed and archived as soon as the project is complete, ready for the next project. Arrays like Areca ARC-5028T2 or Proavio EB800MS give read speeds of 2000+ MB/s,which can play back 4K DPXs in real time.

How should the project be archived?
There are a few follow-up questions to this one, like: Will the project need to be accessed with short notice in the future? LTO is a great long-term archival solution, but pulling large amounts of media off LTO tape isn’t exactly quick. For projects that I suspect will be reopened in the near future, I try to keep an external hard drive or RAID with the necessary media onsite. Sometimes it isn’t possible to keep all of the raw media onsite and quickly accessible, so keeping the editorial media and projects onsite is a good compromise. Offsite, in a controlled, safe, secure location, LTO-6 tapes house a copy of every file used on the project.

Post production technology changes with the blink of an eye, and storage is no exception. Once these questions have been answered, if you are spending any serious amount of money, get an opinion from someone who is intimately familiar with the cutting edge of post production storage. Emphasis on the “post production” part of that sentence, because video I/O is not the same as, say, a bank with the same storage size requirements. The more money devoted to your storage solutions, the more opinions you should seek. Not all storage is created equal, so be 100% positive that the storage you select is optimal for the project’s particular workflow and technical requirements.

There is more than one good storage solution for any workflow, but the first step is always answering as many storage- and workflow-related questions as possible to start taking steps down the right path. Storage decisions are perhaps one of the most complex technical parts of the post process, but like the rest of filmmaking, an exhaustive, thoughtful, and collaborative approach will almost always point in the right direction.

Main Image: G-Tech, QNAP, Avid and Western Digital all make a variety of storage solutions for large and small-scale post production workflows.

Lance Holte is an LA-based post production supervisor and producer. He has spoken and taught at such events as NAB, SMPTE, SIGGRAPH and Createasphere. You can email him at lance@lanceholte.com.

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Panasas has introduced three new products that target those working in the media and entertainment world, a world that requires fast and customizable workflows that offer a path for growth.

Panasas’s ActiveStor is now capable of scaling capacity to 57PB and offering 360GB/s of bandwidth. According to the company, this system doubles metadata performance to cut data access time in half, scales performance and capacity independently and seamlessly adapts to new technology advancements.

The new ActiveStor Director 100 (ASD-100) control-plane engine and the new ActiveStor Hybrid 100 (ASH-100) configurable plug-and-play storage system allows users to design storage systems that meet their exact specifications and workflow requirements, as well as grow the system if needed.

For the first time, Panasas is offering a disaggregated Director Blade — ASD-100, the brain of the Panasas storage system — to provide flexibility. Customers can now add any number of ASD-100s to drive exactly the level of metadata performance they need. With double the raw CPU power and RAM capacity of previous Director Blades, the ASD-100 offers double the metadata performance on metadata-intensive workloads.

Based on industry-standard hardware, the ASD-100 manages metadata and the global namespace; it also acts as a gateway for standard data-access protocols such as NFS and SMB. The ASD-100 uses non-volatile dual in-line memory modules (NVDIMMs) to store metadata transaction logs, and Panasas is contributing its NVDIMM driver to the FreeBSD community.

The ASH-100 and ASD-100 rack

The ASH-100 hardware platform offers the high-capacity HDD (12TB) and SSD (1.9TB) in a parallel hybrid storage system. A broad range of HDD and SSD capacities can be paired as needed to meet specific workflow needs. The ASH-100 can be configured with ASD-100s or can be delivered with integrated traditional ActiveStor Director Blades (DBs), depending on user requirements.

The latest version of this plug-and-play parallel file system features an updated FreeBSD operating foundation and a GUI that supports asynchronous “push” notification of system changes without user interaction.

Panasas’ updated DirectFlow parallel data access protocol offers a 15 percent improvement in throughput thanks to enhancements to memory allocation and readahead. All ActiveStor models will benefit from this performance increase after upgrading to the new release of PanFS.

Using ASD-100, the ASH-100, an updated PanFS 7.0 parallel file system and enhancements to the DirectFlow parallel data-access protocol has these advantages:
Performance – Users can scale metadata performance, data bandwidth, and data capacity independently for faster time-to-results.
Flexibility – The ability to mix and match HDD and SSD configurations under a single global namespace enables users to best match the system performance to their workload requirements.
Productivity – The new ActiveStor solution doubles productivity by cutting data access time in half, regardless of the number of users.
Investment Protection – The solution is backward and forward compatible with the ActiveStor product portfolio.

The ASH-100 is shipping now. The ASD-100 and PanFS 7.0 will be available in Q1 2018.

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Autodesk has updated its Flame 2018 family of 3D visual effects and finishing software, which includes Flame, Flare, Flame Assist and Lustre. Flame 2018.3 offers more efficient ways of working in post, with feature enhancements that offer greater pipeline flexibility, speed and support for emerging formats and technology.

“The new standalone Python console in Flame 2018.3 is a great,” says Treehouse Edit finishing artist John Fegan, a Flame family beta tester. “We’re also excited about the enhanced FBX export with physically based renderer (PBR) for Maya and motion analysis updates. Using motion vector maps, we can now achieve things we couldn’t with a planar tracker or 3D track.”

Flame Family 2018.3 is available today at no additional cost to customers with a current Flame Family 2018 subscription.

We recently asked a few questions of Kenny Francis, president of the company in an effort to find out how he has not only survived in a tough business but thrived over the years.

WHAT DOES MAKING IT 10 YEARS IN THIS INDUSTRY MEAN?
This industry has a high turnover rate. We have been able to maintain a solid brand and studio relationships, building our own brand equity in the process. At the time we started the company high-def television content was new to the marketplace; there were only a handful of vendors that had updated to that technology and could cater to this larger file size. Most existing vendors were using antiquated machines and methodology to distribute HD, causing major bottlenecks at the station level. We built the company in anticipation of this new trend, which allowed us to properly manage our clients post production and distribution needs.

HOW HAS THE POST PIPELINE CHANGED IN A DECADE?
Now everything is needed “immediately.” Lightning fast is now the new norm. Ten years ago there was a decent amount of time in production schedules for editing, spot tagging, trafficking, clearance, every part of the post process… these days everything is expected to happen now. There’s been a huge sense of time compression because the exception has now become the rule.

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN THE FUTURE?
Staying relevant as a company and trying to evolve with the times and our clients’ needs. What worked 10 years ago creatively or productively doesn’t hold the same weight today. We’re living in an age of online and guerrilla marketing campaigns where advertising has already become wildly diversified, so staying relevant is key. To be successful, we’ve had to anticipate these trends and stay nimble enough to reconfigure our equipment to cater to them. We were early adopters of 3D content, and now we are gearing up for UHD finishing and distribution.

WHAT DO YOU SEE FOR THE FUTURE OF YOUR COMPANY AND THE INDUSTRY?
We’re constantly accruing new business, so we’re looking forward to building onto our list of accounts. As a new technology launches, emerging companies compete, one acquires them all and becomes a monopoly, and then the cycle repeats itself. We have been through a few of these cycles, but plan to see many more in the years ahead.

HOW DID YOU ESTABLISH THAT FOUNDATION?
Well, aside from just building a business, it’s been about building a home for our team — giving them a platform to grow. Our employees are family. My uncle used to tell me, “If you concentrate on building a business and not the person, you will not achieve, but if you concentrate on building the person, you achieve both.” SpeedMedia has been focused on building that kind of team — we pride ourselves on supporting one another.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE SPACE AT SPEEDMEDIA STUDIO?
As comfy as possible. We’ve been in the same place for 10 years — a block away from those iconic Venice letters. It’s a great place to be, and why we’ve never left. It’s a home away from home for our employees, so we’ve got big couches, a kitchen, televisions and even our own bar for the monthly company mixers.

Stop by and you’ll see a little bit of Matrix code scrolling down some of the walls, as this historic building was actually Joel Silver’s production office back in the day. If these walls could talk…

HOW HAS VENICE CHANGED SINCE YOU OPENED?
Venice is a living and breathing city, now more than ever. Despite Silicon Beach moving into the area and putting a serious premium on real estate, we’re staying put. It would have been cheaper to move inland, but then that’s all it would have been — an office, not a second home. We’d lose some of our identity for sure.

WHO ARE SOME OF YOUR CLIENTS?
It all started with Burger King. I have a long-standing relationship with the company since my days back at Amoeba, a Santa Monica-based advertising agency. I held a number of positions there and learned the business inside and out. The experience and relationships cultivated there helped me bring Burger King in as an anchor account to help launch SpeedMedia back in 2007. We now work with a wide variety of brands, from Adidas to Old Navy to Expedia to Jaguar Land Rover.

WHAT’S IT LIKE RUNNING A BICOASTAL BUSINESS?
In our business, it’s important to have a presence on both coasts. We have some great clients in NYC, and it’s nice to actually be local for them. Styles of business on the east coast are a bit different than in LA. It actually used to make more sense back in the tape-based workflow days for national logistics. We had a realtime exchange between coasts, creating physical handoffs.

Now we’re basically hard-lined together, operators in Soho working remotely with Venice Beach and vice-versa, sharing assets and equipment and collaborating 24-hours a day. This is all possible thanks to our proprietary order management software system, Matrix. This system allows SpeedMedia the ability to seamlessly integrate with every digital distribution network globally via API tap-ins with our various technology partners.

WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT WAS TIME TO START YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
Well, we were at the end of one of these cycles in the marketplace and many of our brand relationships did not want to go along with the monopoly that was forming. That’s when we created SpeedMedia. We listened to our clients and made sure they had a logical and reliable alternative in the marketplace for post, distribution and asset management. And here we are 10 years later.

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There is new movie coming out this week that is fairly unique. Telling the true story of Eric LeMarque surviving eight days lost in a blizzard, 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain is the first film shot and edited in its entirety for the new Barco Escape theatrical format. If you don’t know what Barco Escape is, you are about to find out.

This article is meant to answer just about every question you might have about the format and how we made the film, on which I was post supervisor, production engineer and finishing editor.

What is Barco Escape?
Barco Escape is a wraparound visual experience — it consists of three projection screens filling the width of the viewer’s vision with a total aspect ratio of 7.16:1. The exact field of view will vary depending on where you are sitting in the auditorium, but usually 120-180 degrees. Similar to IMAX, it is not about filling the entire screen with your main object but leaving that in front of the audience and letting the rest of the image surround them and fill their peripheral vision in a more immersive experience. Three separate 2K scope theatrical images play at once resulting in 6144×858 pixels of imagery to fill the room.

Is this the first Barco Escape movie?
Technically, four other films have screened in Barco Escape theaters, the most popular one being last year’s release of Star Trek Beyond. But none of these films used the entire canvas offered by Escape throughout the movie. They had up to 20 minutes of content on the side screens, but the rest of the film was limited to the center screen that viewers are used to. Every shot in 6 Below was framed with the surround format in mind, and every pixel of the incredibly wide canvas is filled with imagery.

How are movies created for viewing in Escape?
There are two approaches that can be used to fill the screen with content. One is to place different shots on each screen in the process of telling the story. The other is to shoot a wide enough field of view and high enough resolution to stretch a single image across the screens. For 6 Below, director Scott Waugh wanted to shoot everything at 6K, with the intention of filling all the screens with main image. “I wanted to immerse the viewer in Eric’s predicament, alone on the mountain.”

Cinematographer Michael Svitak shot with the Red Epic Dragon. He says, “After testing both spherical and anamorphic lens options, I chose to shoot Panavision Primo 70 prime lenses because of their pristine quality of the entire imaging frame.” He recorded in 6K-WS (2.37:1 aspect ratio at 6144×2592), framing with both 7:1 Barco Escape and a 2.76:1 4K extraction in mind. Red does have an 8:1 option and a 4:1 option that could work if Escape was your only deliverable. But since there are very few Escape theaters at the moment, you would literally be painting yourself into a corner. Having more vertical resolution available in the source footage opens up all sorts of workflow possibilities.

This still left a few challenges in post: to adjust the framing for the most comfortable viewing and to create alternate framing options for other deliverables that couldn’t use the extreme 7:1 aspect ratio. Other projects have usually treated the three screens separately throughout the conform process, but we treated the entire canvas as a single unit until the very last step, breaking out three 2K streams for the DCP encode.

What extra challenges did Barco Escape delivery pose for 6 Below’s post workflow?
Vashi Nedomansky edited the original 6K R3D files in Adobe Premiere Pro, without making proxies, on some maxed-out Dell workstations. We did the initial edit with curved ultra-wide monitors and 4K TVs. “Once Mike McCarthy optimized the Dell systems, I was free to edit the source 6K Red RAW files and not worry about transcodes or proxies,” he explains. “With such a quick turnaround everyday, and so much footage coming in, it was critical that I could jump on the footage, cut my scenes, see if they were playing well and report back to the director that same day if we needed additional shots. This would not have been possible time-wise if we were transcoding and waiting for footage to cut. I kept pushing the hardware and software, but it never broke or let me down. My first cut was 2 hours and 49 minutes long, and we played it back on one Premiere Pro timeline in realtime. It was crazy!”

All of the visual effects were done at the full shooting resolution of 6144×2592, as was the color grade. Once Vashi had the basic cut in place, there was no real online conform, just some cleanup work to do before sending it to color as an 8TB stack of 6K frames. At that point, we started examining it from the three-screen perspective with three TVs to preview it in realtime, courtesy of the Mosaic functionality built into Nvidia’s Quadro GPU cards. Shots were realigned to avoid having important imagery in the seams, and some areas were stretched to compensate for the angle of the side screens from the audiences perspective.

DP Michael Svitak and director Scott Waugh

Once we had the final color grade completed (via Mike Sowa at Technicolor using Autodesk Lustre), we spent a day in an Escape theater analyzing the effect of reflections between the screens and its effect on the contrast. We made a lot of adjustments to keep the luminance of the side screens from washing out the darks on the center screen, which you can’t simulate on TVs in the edit bay. “It was great to be able to make the final adjustments to the film in realtime in that environment. We could see the results immediately on all three screens and how they impacted the room,” says Waugh.

Once we added the 7.1 mix, we were ready to export assets for our delivery in many different formats and aspect ratios. Making the three streams for Escape playback was a simple as using the crop tool in Adobe Media Encoder to trim the sides in 2K increments.

How can you see movies in the Barco Escape format?
Barco maintains a list of theaters that have Escape screens installed, which can be found at ready2escape.com. But for readers in the LA area, the only opportunity to see a film in Barco Escape in the foreseeable future is to attend one of the Thursday night screenings of 6Below at the Regal LA Live Stadium or the Cinemark XD at Howard Hughes Center. There are other locations available to see the film in standard theatrical format, but as a new technology, Barco Escape is only available in a limited number of locations. Hopefully, we will see more Escape films and locations to watch them in the future.

Mike McCarthy is an online editor/workflow consultant with 10 years of experience on feature films and commercials. He has been involved in pioneering new solutions for tapeless workflows, DSLR filmmaking and multi-screen and surround video experiences. Check out his site.

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Marc Webb has directed movies both big and small. He made his feature film debut in 2009 with the low-budget indie rom-com (500) Days of Summer, which was nominated for two Golden Globes. He then went on to helm two recent The Amazing Spider-Man blockbusters, the fourth and fifth films in the multi-billion-dollar-grossing franchise.

Webb isn’t just about the big screen. He directed and executive produced the TV series Limitless for CBS, based on the film starring Bradley Cooper, and is currently an executive producer and director of the CW’s Golden Globe-winning series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Marc Webb

Now Webb, whose last film was the drama Gifted, released earlier this year, has again returned to his indie roots with the film The Only Living Boy in New York, starring Jeff Bridges, Kate Beckinsale, Pierce Brosnan, Cynthia Nixon, Callum Turner and Kiersey Clemons.

Set in New York City, the sharp and witty coming-of-age story focuses on a privileged young man, Thomas Webb (Turner) — the son of a publisher and his artistic wife — who has just graduated from college. After moving from his parents’ Upper West Side apartment to the Lower East Side, he befriends his neighbor W.F. (Bridges), an alcoholic writer who dispenses worldly wisdom alongside healthy shots of whiskey.

Thomas’ world begins to shift when he discovers that his long-married father (Brosnan) is having an affair with a seductive younger woman (Beckinsale). Determined to break up the relationship, Thomas ends up sleeping with his father’s mistress, launching a chain of events that will change everything he thinks he knows about himself and his family.

Collaborating with Webb from behind the scenes was director of photography Stuart Dryburgh (Gifted, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Alice Through the Looking Glass) and editor Tim Streeto (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, Vinyl).

I recently talked with Webb about making the film, and if there is another superhero movie in his future.

What was the appeal of making another small film on the heels of Gifted?
They were both born out of a similar instinct, an impulse to simplify after doing two blockbusters. I had them lined up after Spider-Man and the timing worked out.

What sort of themes were you interested in exploring through this?
I think of it as a fable, with a very romantic image of New York as the backdrop, and on some levels it’s an examination of honesty or coming clean. I think people often cover a lot in trying to protect others, and that’s important in life where you have various degrees of truth-telling. But at some point you have to come clean, and that can be very hard. So it’s about that journey for Thomas, and regardless of the complex nature of his desires, he tries to be honest with himself and those close to him.

Can you talk about the look of New York in this film and working with your DP, who also shot your last film?
It was the same DP, but we had the opposite approach and philosophy on this. Gifted was very naturalistic with a diverse color palette and lots of hand-held stuff. On this we mostly kept the camera at eye level, as if it was a documentary, and it has more panache and “style” and more artifice. We restrained the color palette since New York has a lot of neutral tones and people wear a lot of black, and I wanted to create a sort tribute to the classic New York films I love. So we used a lot of blacks and grays, and almost no primary colors, to create an austere look. I wanted to push that but without becoming too stylized; that way when you do see a splash of red or some bright color, it has more impact and it becomes meaningful and significant. We also tried to do a lot of fun shots, like high angle stuff that gives you this objective POV of the city, making it a bit more dramatic.

Why did you shoot 35mm rather than digital?
I’ve always loved film and shooting in film, and it also suited this story as it’s a classic medium. And when you’re projecting digital, sometimes there’s an aliasing in the highlights that bothers me. It can be corrected, but aesthetically I just prefer film. And everyone respects film on set. The actors know you’re not just going to redo takes indefinitely. They feel a little pressure about the money.

Doesn’t that affect the post workflow nowadays?
Yes, it does, as most post people are now used to working in a purely digital format, but I think shooting analog still works better for a smaller film like this, and I’ve had pretty good experiences with film and the labs. There are more labs now than there were two years ago, and there are still a lot of films being shot on film. TV is almost completely digital now, with the odd exception of Breaking Bad. So the post workflow for film is still very accessible.

Where did you do the post?
We did the editing at Harbor Picture Company, and all the color correction at Company 3 with Stefan Sonnenfeld, who uses Blackmagic Resolve. C5’s Ron Bochar was the supervising sound editor and did a lot of it at Harbor. (For the mix at Harbor he employed D-Command using Avid Pro Tools as a mix engine.)

Do you like the post process?
I really love post… going through all the raw footage and then gradually molding it and shaping it. And because of my music video background I love working on all the sound and music in particular. I started off as an editor, and my very first job in the business was re-cutting music videos for labels and doing documentaries and EPKs. Then I directed a bunch of music videos and shorts, so it’s a process that I’m very familiar with and understand the power of. I feel very much at home in an edit bay, and I edit the movie in my head as I shoot.

You edited with Tim Streeto. Tell us how it worked.
I loved his work on The Squid and the Whale, and I was anxious to work with him. We had a cool relationship. He wasn’t on the set, and he began assembling as I shot, as we had a fairly fast post schedule. I knew what I wanted, so it wasn’t particularly dramatic. We made some changes as we went, but it was pretty straightforward. We had our cut in 10 weeks, and the whole post was just three or four months.

What were the main challenges of editing this?
Tracking the internal life of the character and making sure the tone felt playful. We tried several different openings to the film before we settled on the voiceover that had this organic raison-d’etre, and that all evolved in the edit.

The Spider-Man films obviously had a huge number of very complex visual effects shots. Did you do many on this film?
Very few. Phosphene in New York did them. We had the opening titles and then we did some morphing of actors from time to time in order to speed things up. (Says Phosphene CEO/EP Vivian Connolly, “We designed an animated the graphic opening sequence of the film — using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects — which was narrated by Jeff Bridges. We commissioned original illustrations by Tim Hamilton, and animated them to help tell the visual story of the opening narration of the film.”)

It has a great jazzy soundtrack. Can you talk about the importance of music and sound?
The score had to mingle with all the familiar sounds of the concrete jungle, and we used a bit of reverb on some of the sounds to give it more of a mystical quality. I really love the score by Rob Simonsen, and my favorite bit is the wedding toast sequence. We’d temped in waltzes, but it never quite worked. Then Rob came up with this tango, and it all just clicked.

I also used some Dave Brubeck, some Charlie Mingus and some Moondog — he was this well-known blind New York street musician I’ve been listening to a lot lately — and together it all evoked the mood I wanted. Music is so deeply related to how I started off making movies, so music immediately helps me understand a scene and how to tell it the best way, and it’s a lot of fun for me.

How about the DI? What look did you go for?
It was all about getting a very cool look and palette. We’d sometimes dial up a bit of red in a background, but we steered away from primary colors and kept it a bit darker than most of my films. Most of the feel comes from the costumes and sets and locations, and Stefan did a great job, and he’s so fast.

What’s next? Another huge superhero film?
I’m sure I’ll do another at some point, but I’ve really enjoyed these last two films. I had a ball hanging out with the actors. Smaller movies are not such a huge risk, and you have more fun and can be more experimental.

I just did a TV pilot, Extinct, for CBS, which was a real fun murder mystery, and I’ll probably do more TV next.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

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Nominees in the creative categories for the 2017 HPA Awards have been announced. Receiving a record-breaking number of entrants this year, the HPA Awards creative categories recognize the outstanding work done by individuals and teams who bring compelling content to a global audience.

Launched in 2006, the HPA Awards recognize outstanding achievement in editing, sound, visual effects and color grading for work in television, commercials and feature films. The winners of the 12th Annual HPA Awards will be announced on November 16 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

In other awards news, Larry Chernoff has been named recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Winners of the coveted Engineering Excellence Award include Colorfront Engine by Colorfront, Dolby Vision Post Production Tools by Dolby, Mistika VR by SGO and the Weapon 8K Vista Vision by Red Digital Cinema. These special awards will be bestowed at the HPA Awards gala as well.

The HPA Awards gala ceremony is expected to be a sold-out affair and early ticket purchase is encouraged. Tickets for the HPA Awards are on sale now and can be purchased online at www.hpaawards.net.

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Giving a decade-long very successful campaign a bit of a goose presents unique challenges, including maintaining tone and creative continuity while bringing a fresh perspective. To help with the launch of the new 2018 Ford F-150, Big Block director Paul Trillo brought all of his tools to the table, offering an innovative spin to the campaign.

Big Block worked closely with agency GTB, from development to previz, live-action, design, editorial, all the way through color and finish.

Trillo wanted to maintain the tone and voice of the original campaign while adding a distinct technical style and energy. Dynamic camera movement and quick editing helped bring new vitality to the “Built Ford Tough” concept.

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Creative agency We Are Royale has added Heidi Netzley as director of business development. She will be responsible for helping to evolve the company’s business development process and building its direct-to-brand vertical.

Most recently, Netzley held a similar position at Digital Kitchen, where she expanded and diversified the company’s client base and also led projects like a digital documentary series for Topgolf and show launch campaigns for CBS and E! Network. Prior to that, she was business development manager at Troika, where she oversaw brand development initiatives and broadcast network rebrands for the agency’s network clients, including ABC, AwesomenessTV, Audience Network and Sundance Cinemas.

Netzley launched her career at Disney/ABC Television Group within the entertainment marketing division. During her seven-year tenure, she held various roles ranging from marketing specialist to manager of creative services, where she helped manage the brand across multi-platform marketing campaigns for all of ABC’s primetime properties.

“With our end-to-end content creation capabilities, we can be both a strategic and creative partner to other types of brands, and I look forward to helping make that happen,” says Netzley.

When Netzley isn’t training for the 2018 LA Marathon, she’s busy fundraising for causes close to her heart, including the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, for which she was nominated as the organization’s 2016 Woman of the Year. She currently sits on the society’s leadership committee.